In any movie or TV show about crime you know things are serious when the FBI shows up. The FBI is like the big leagues of criminal investigation, none of this amateur junk dealing with small time crime. This is for serial killers and organized crime and international drug smuggling.  Yep, the FBI are the real professionals. Except for when they screw up really, really badly.

10. For Decades the FBI Produced Flawed or Altered Evidence in Hundreds of Trials

Many people in the Western world have a passing familiarity with the criminal justice system not by firsthand experience but through fiction. Shows like Law and Order and CSI have routinely been in the most watched television shows for decades with hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide. CSI even spawned the idea of the “CSI Effect,” which blames the show for skewing the way jurors expect evidence to be presented in trials, despite the fact that real world evidence of the effect is harder to nail down. 

Whether the effect is real, the anecdotal ideas that come with it are generally accepted. Agencies like the FBI should collect forensic evidence that can be used at trial to help put bad guys away! Except we have evidence that the FBI bungled that harder than you could ever imagine.

In 2015, the FBI admitted that, for nearly two decades leading up to the year 2000, almost all the evidence given at trial by almost all of their experts in the microscopic hair comparison unit was utter trash. Twenty-six of the 28 experts overstated matches, which is a fancy way of saying they lied, in a way that favored the prosecution. They did this in 95% of nearly 300 trials that were reviewed.

This scandal was part of a much larger issue with FBI abuses of evidence that was kicked off all the way back in 1994 by a whistleblower named Dr. Frederic Whitehurst. Whitehurst noted systemic abuses including altered reports, alterations of evidence and people testifying outside their areas of expertise. 

Because he was reporting the FBI to itself, it was years before anything came of Whitehurst’s revelations. A full decade passed before the Justice Department finished their own investigation, which only took place after the FBI ignored Whitehurst and he had to go to outside sources.

Some cases Whitehurst brought up with flawed practices included the OJ trial, Oklahoma City, and the first World Trade Center bombing.

9. Counterintelligence Agent Robert Hanssen was a Russian Spy

Any organization probably doesn’t want a spy on the payroll. That’s as true of a weapon’s manufacturer as it is of KFC, what with that secret recipe of theirs. But a place like the FBI needs to be really careful about moles or else it triggers a whole Mission: Impossible scenario that probably even Tom Cruise can’t fix. 

Luckily, the FBI is on top of this kind of thing as has people on staff whose job it is to hunt down moles and eliminate them. People like Robert Hanssen who, ironically, turned out to be the mole he was hunting. What are the odds?!?

Hanssen became an agent back in 1976. Over the course of his career he provided the Soviet Union and later Russia with an abundance of top secret info for which they paid him $1.4 million. Some of that was even in diamonds, which is very James Bondian. He was caught in 2001. 

Hanssen was a counterintelligence agent, which made him very effective at being a spy since it was his job to detect people doing what he was doing. He even got a CIA agent investigated for two years as both agencies knew someone was leaking info, they just did not know who.

When he was finally caught, it was the result of 300 other agents actively investigating him. He ended up being sentenced to life in prison where he died in 2023. The FBI called him “the most damaging spy in Bureau history.”

8. The FBI Had Trouble Finding Cybersecurity Experts Because Of Their Own Policies

While one stereotype of the FBI sees them as an elite crime-fighting agency, another depicts them as kind of lame. A little bit square, if you will. By-the-book, suit-wearing sticklers for rules and protocol. And that may not be 100% true all the time, it has been true enough that it bit the agency in the butt publicly at least once.

When cybercrime became more than just a weird Hollywood idea for suspense, law enforcement needed to get on board with the new reality that a lot of crime was going to happen virtually. Since “old” agents were not as up to date on technology, they needed newer, tech savvy recruits to head up burgeoning cyber crime units. But that was a problem because of FBI rules.

To be in the FBI you can’t do things like smoke weed, for instance. They’ll drug test to make sure. But when you’re trying to hire hackers from a civilian population, this is an issue because nearly everyone they were interviewing smoked weed. 

In 2014, FBI Director James Comey stated they were having issues hiring and expanding the division because so many of the best people smoked weed and FBI rules wouldn’t allow them to be hired. They were forced into a corner where loosening that restriction was their best option. Later he pulled back and said he was just joking when called out by a senator because weed is bad, kids. 

7. Burglars Once Robbed An FBI Office After Asking the FBI to Leave the Door Unlocked

You would assume it’s very rare that anyone breaks into the FBI offices, Tom Cruise and Scientology (again) notwithstanding. Any regular burglar would have to be very crafty, indeed. Bold and smart and with nerves of steel. How would they even get on premises in the first place?

If you guessed “by leaving a note asking people not to lock the door” then you’d be correct. In 1970, a group looking to explore the secret spying of J. Edgar Hoover was planning raids on FBI field offices and hit a snag in Delaware. They couldn’t pretend to be locksmiths replacing the lock and no one had the skill to pick it. Instead, one of them wrote a note asking for it to be left unlocked. When they returned in the night, it was unlocked. They stole their files and left.

6. The FBI Tried To Infiltrate Mosques Which Then Reported Their Informant as a Terrorist

The events of September 11, 2001 changed the way the FBI did a lot of things. One of their big changes involved a much heavier focus on surveillance of American Muslims. For years afterwards and probably to this day the FBI has focused on infiltrating mosques and other Muslim gathering places in search of intelligence on terrorism. 

In their fervor to find the next bin Laden, they seriously stumbled and no place worse than in Irvine, California. It was there that the FBI sent an undercover informant named Craig Monteilh. His job was to get into the mosque, record anyone saying terroristy things, and have the FBI come and take away the trash!

The problem was that there were no terrorists in the mosque, just people minding their business. Monteilh seemed to fit in at first, converting in front of others and making friends. But as he proceeded to secretly record video and audio of his new friends, he was such a creepy disruption to everyone, talking constantly about violent jihad, that the people of the mosque went to law enforcement to report him and get a restraining order.

5. The 1986 Miami Shootout Was a Blundered Operation That Led to Several Deaths

April 11, 1986 was the date of one of the bloodiest shootouts in FBI history. Agents in Miami were chasing a pair of known armed robbers. They were known to use high powered weapons, and they were violent, so many agents were in pursuit of them – eight in five cars.

The agents tried to run the criminals off the road, and all hell effectively broke loose. The two men had far superior firepower and unloaded on all five cars. The agents were using standard issue weapons and ammo with standard issue bullet proof vests. They did next to nothing.

Two agents died in the firefight, three were grievously wounded, and two more sustained less severe injuries. Only one didn’t get hurt at all. The assailants had ammo that blasted through the cars and through the vests of the agents and eventually led to improved ammo for law enforcement as a result.

While new ammo is maybe an upside, so many things went wrong to get there. Agents in the pursuit were not communicating their position well. Backup was late as a result. Agents on scene also reported a variety of physiological effects like time distortions, auditory problems like not hearing warnings and tunnel vision, all brought on by the intense stress they were not prepared to endure.  Better preparation and training could have saved lives and while the incident led to those things, it was too late for the slain and injured back in 1986.

4. It’s a Wonderful Life Was Investigated by the FBI 

The FBI runs on your tax dollars so it’s good to know they’re spending money wisely. Like how the Bureau investigated the movie It’s a Wonderful Life for being communist propaganda back in the day. 

What set them off? The banker character, Mr. Potter, is portrayed as bad in the film. To the FBI that meant the movie was suggesting capitalism is bad. And the movie also focuses on the main character’s depression, which was also considered anti-American. 

During the investigation, agents noted the screenwriters had been observed having lunch with known Communists. They deemed the movie subversive and then, you know, that was it. 

3. The FBI Allegedly Tracked Falafel Purchases to Find Terrorists

So if you’re in the FBI and you need to find potential terrorists, what do you do? Talk to informants? Dig into people’s background or communications? In 2007, it was reported that the agency was hunting down people who bought falafel and tahini.

According to reports, which the FBI denied, there was an effort in 2005 and 2006 to data mine purchases of Middle Eastern ingredients in stores in California to see if there was a spike in sales of things like falafel. This, combined with other data, would be used to focus on targets. That was the story, anyway. Again, the FBI denied this happened despite other sources claiming to have found evidence of it that later mysteriously disappeared. 

2. The FBI Framed Four Men for Murder 

A good way to make yourself sound paranoid is to talk about how you think the FBI is setting you up. Because that’s crazy talk, right? Why would the FBI ever set up someone for a crime when it’s their job to solve crimes? Heh!

Turns out that yes, the FBI have absolutely set up people for crimes they didn’t commit. In 2007, the FBI was ordered to pay $101 million for framing four men for murder. Why did they do such a thing? To protect the actual murderer who then agreed to become one of their informants. 

The story dates back 40 years prior to the payout, after released documents showed the FBI was trying to cozy up to a pair of mobsters and let them frame the four men to cover their crimes. Only two of the four men were still alive at the time the story broke. All four had been convicted and given life sentences, three of which were commuted from death sentences.

1. The FBI Tried to Build a RICO Case Against the Wu-Tang Clan

Watch enough shows about organized crime, like The Sopranos or Sons of Anarchy, and you’re going to learn about RICO cases. RICO stands for “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act” which is specifically used to target gangs. If law enforcement can prove a gang of people conspired to commit various crimes, not only can they be charged with those crimes but RICO as well which makes it a Federal crime with much stiffer prison sentences. 

For a while, the FBI was investigating the Wu Tang Clan under RICO at the behest of the NYPD. The Wu Tang Clan as in the musicians, not a group of criminals who were using the same name. 

Far be it from us to suggest that Ol’ Dirty Bastard was not prone to bending the odd law, but the man was no Cosa Nostra, either. Despite that, during the 90s and beyond, the FBI was investigating the group for ties to drugs, guns, murder, carjackings and more. They were fully convinced the Clan was up to no good. 

The story came to light after an FOIA request following ODB’s death and it seems like the FBI eventually gave up on their attempts since none of the rest of the crew were ever put away from organized crime-related charges.

The word expert carries with it a lot of weight. When you hear that someone is an expert, you expect they have donated much of their life to learning about something specific. They have studied, mastered, and know this thing inside and out, whatever it may be. That’s the idea, anyway. But as it happens, sometimes people who are called experts have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. They just hope you believe them because why wouldn’t you believe an expert?

10. Fingerprint Experts Change Conclusions Under Pressure

Fingerprinting has been used to aid in criminal investigations for over 100 years. Very little about the technology has changed in that time, because why would it? Comparing one fingerprint to another is fairly simple, even if the technology used to compare the fingerprints might have changed. That doesn’t mean it’s foolproof by any means.

Evidence has shown that so-called fingerprint experts can change their conclusions based on outside considerations. In so many words, they make mistakes. For instance, a fingerprint expert working for the FBI wrongly identified a lawyer from Oregon as one of the suspects in the 2004 Madrid train bombing. 

According to a later report, the fingerprint they had was of poor quality. But due to the high pressures of the case, it was wrongly identified as belonging to the Oregon lawyer. Subordinates of the fingerprint expert stated they didn’t feel they could challenge the expert’s findings. 

9. Wine Experts Consistently Have No Idea What They’re Talking About

The world of wine is no stranger to accusations of pretension. For many years, it’s been a common belief that expensive wine must be good and cheap wine must be terrible. For instance, the idea of wine in a box was considered a joke for years after it was introduced. Some of that tarnish has worn away in the last while, but not completely. This is all exacerbated by wine experts, or at least people who think they’re wine experts.

In 2001, a study was released that tore the world of wine tasting apart. The man behind the study had added red food coloring to white wine and then had wine experts taste it. Most of them described it the way they would describe a red wine, even though it wasn’t. All it took was a little food coloring to expose them as having no idea what they were talking about. 

Another test saw 25 cheap wines tested by blindfolded experts. They all picked different wines as the best; only one was a top pick on everyone’s list. There was nothing linking one to another beyond that.

In yet another test, wine experts were given the same wine three different times. Some judges had mostly consistent scores; others varied wildly. And these were all recognized experts whose ratings could mean the difference between a wine winning a competition and the vineyard behind it becoming incredibly popular and wealthy or remaining obscure. The result was that medals distributed through these contests were essentially handed out at random. 

8. Art Experts Are Easily Fooled Even by Animals and Children

If wine experts are not to be trusted, then what should we make of art experts? People are fond of saying that art is subjective, so what exactly can you trust an art expert to tell you about art? Certainly, there is a section of expertise that can deal with whether a painting is truly by a certain artist and not a forgery or if it is representative of the art style, but an expert telling you if art is good or bad? That’s a little shady.

In 1964, Pierre Brassau set out to test the pretension of the art world. He made four paintings, each commissioned by a Swedish journalist specifically to test the expertise of art critics. If the critics liked the art, the journalist believed it would prove how little they knew because Pierre Brassau was a chimp from the zoo. One critic said it looked like an ape had done it. Another said Brassau was “an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer.”

A more recent experiment pitted experts against non-experts. Each was given photos, some of real art, some just passport photos, and asked to identify which were from the Museum of Modern Art. Some of each had a faint MOMA stamp in the corner. Both experts and non-experts were equally as bad at identifying “real” art vs. “fake.”

Back in 1993, a panel of experts chose 150 works of art for a fine art exhibition in Manchester. One painting was later revealed to have been done by a four-year-old. The painting was allowed to remain in the show and got six bids.

7. Audio Experts Cannot Tell The Difference Between Cheap Cables and Expensive Ones

Some people are really into their stereos and cables. If you’ve ever had to buy cables, then you may be aware there’s a whole world of audio experts who recommend one kind over another. Some cables can get incredibly expensive with gold or silver connectors and other snazzy elements inside. But are they really better?

It turns out that some of the self-proclaimed audio experts out there can’t tell the difference between a high-priced audio cable and a simple coat hanger. 

Some people maintain that higher-priced wires are made from higher-quality materials and allow certain attributes of sound to travel better. A sound engineer went out of his way to create a null tester device that strips down every possible aspect of a signal traveling through wires to expose any potential differences to show that audio through cheap wires comes out exactly the same as audio through expensive wires by testing four different sets ranging from $5 to $700 and getting the same results each time. 

6. Handwriting Experts Verified Hitler’s Diaries Only Top Have Them Outed as Fakes Days Later

Heading back to the courtroom, handwriting experts have also been used for their expert testimony to help convict criminals. They have also been relied on to confirm historical documents. Unfortunately, they’re just as liable to make mistakes as every other expert. The most famous case of this relates to the Hitler Diaries.

Supposedly discovered in 1983, the diaries of Hitler were said to have been hidden away since 1945. A trio of handwriting experts confirmed them as genuine, and they were sold for $6 million. No German experts were asked to authenticate the works. Two weeks after they were published, a German newspaper absolutely raked the diaries over the coals exposing an abundance of evidence that they were fake. They’d been made very recently and were produced as a forgery to get money.

A reporter for the magazine that paid for the diaries had commissioned the fakes with a known forger. He ended up going to prison, as did the forger, and the main handwriting expert suffered a massive blow to his reputation

5. A Kidnapping Expert Was Kidnapped After Giving a Speech About Avoiding Kidnapping

This one is a lot grimmer than our other entries. Still, the irony is too high to ignore. Felix Batista was an expert in kidnapping and went to Mexico in 2008 to speak at a seminar on the subject of how to avoid being kidnapped.

After his seminar, Batista got a call from a friend who claimed to have been kidnapped. Batista, a negotiator who had secured the release of many kidnapping victims, began to work to help his friend get free. He was told to go to a restaurant and, while there, got a call saying his friend had been released and they were driving him to the restaurant to meet Batista.

Batista went outside, leaving his phone and ID in the restaurant, and was promptly kidnapped by whoever had been calling him. He was never seen again.

4. Recruiting Experts Gave Opinions on a Fake Player

College sports are worth a lot of money to people, and recruiting experts have to try to make bank by trying to convince people they know who the next big thing will be. In 1993, coach Bobby Knight made many of these experts look like fools by recruiting 6-foot-8 basketball phenom Ivan Renko from Yugoslavia.

Experts quickly jumped on the Renko bandwagon and began analyzing his skillset, talking him up and even referencing the times they’d seen him play. The fact that Knight made Renko up and he wasn’t a real person at all exposed the fraud for what it was. 

3. Reports Written by AI Are Able to Fool Experts

There is quite a controversy over the use of AI to write content on the internet these days. Amazon is being flooded with books written by AI, and if you’ve read any creative writing by an AI program, you’ll notice it’s not very good. On the other hand, AI is very good at writing technical reports. So good, in fact, that experts can be fooled by artificial intelligence. 

In one test, cybersecurity experts were tricked by reports written by AI about threats in their field. Misinformation written by AI can convincingly make its way online, and if it can trick experts, such as with cybersecurity or Covid-19 reports, it could just as easily fool everyday people.

2. Family Court Experts Are Often Unqualified

Some topics are a little more difficult to become experts in than others. An expert golfer, for instance, would be able to play a good round of golf almost every time objectively. But what does it mean to be a family court expert? Unfortunately, far less than you might think.

Psychologists are often called as expert witnesses in family court settings. But research has shown that these experts aren’t always qualified to do what they’re asked to do. A 2012 study showed that 20% of experts called to testify are unqualified to do so. The report went on to find much more damning results. Two-thirds of the reports made by the so-called experts reviewed for the study were found to be poor or very poor, and 90% of the experts weren’t even in clinical practice when their expertise was called upon. One single expert was even used in 90% of the cases reviewed. 

1. Experts in Every Field Fail at Predicting the Future

Have you ever heard someone online joke about how they expected to have flying cars and jetpacks by now?  This stems from predictions we and our parents grew up with that by the year 2000, we’d be living in some kind of science fiction utopia. If you go back far enough, they were probably predicting a sci-fi utopia for the year 1900 as well. It turns out that experts in all fields suck at predicting the future.

Foreign affairs experts were once asked to predict future geopolitical events, like if the Soviet Union would fall by 1993. Their predictions were on par with “dart-throwing chimps.” In 1934, Albert Einstein said there was no indication that nuclear power would ever be attainable. In 1968, biologist Paul Ehrlich predicted global chaos and mayhem where, in the absolute best case, half a billion people would die of starvation as governments enacted population control. The opposite ended up happening, and starvation went from claiming 50 out of every 100,000 people in the ’60s to 2.6 out of every 100,000 by the ’90s. 

People are predisposed to hate randomness. Things like the gambler’s fallacy have shown this: people will throw the dice harder to try to get higher numbers and softer for lower numbers as if it makes any difference. We want to believe we can control things even if it makes no logical sense. So the idea of a random future doesn’t work with our brains. We make predictions, and time and time again, they are horribly wrong.

Well, unless we’re talking about the writers of The Simpsons.